NEH Institute: Venice, the Jews, and Italian Culture
Summer 2006
Core Reading List
Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi Continis
Riccardo Calimani, The Ghetto of Venice, and/or Umberto Fortis, Ghetto on the Lagoon
Christopher Duggan, A Concise Account of Italian History
William Dean Howells, “The Ghetto and the Jews of Venice,” in Venetian Life
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
Leone Modena, Hayye Yehuda: The Autobiography of a Seventeenth Century Rabbi
Caryl Phillips, The Nature of Blood
RainerMaria Rilke, “A Scene from the Ghetto of Venice,” in Stories of God
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Richard Sennett, “Fear of Touching: The Jewish Ghetto in Renaissance Venice,” Chapter 7 of
Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization
Israel Zangwill, “A Child of the Ghetto” and “Chad Gadya,” in Dreamers of the Ghetto
Additional Readings
Calabi, Donatello. “The ‘City of the Jews’.” In The Jews of Early Modern Venice. Robert C.
Davis and Benjamin Ravid (eds.). The John Hopkins University Press 2001. pp.31-52.
Cowan, Alex. “The Jews and the City in the Mediterranean area.” In Mediterranean Urban Culture, 1400-1700. Alex Cowen (ed.). University of Exeter Press, 2000. pp. 45-55.
Gunzberg, Lynn M. Strangers at Home: Jews in the Italian Literary Imagination. University of California Press 1992. pp. 16-56.
Katz, Dana E. “The Contours of Tolerance: Jews and the Corpus Domini Altarpiece in Urbino.” Art Bulletin 85.4 (December 2003): 646-661.
Katz, Dana E. “Painting and the Politics of Persecution: Representing the Jew in Fifteenth-Century Mantua.” Art History 23.4 (November 2000): 475-95.
Katz, Eric. “The Authenticity of Place in Culture and Nature: Thoughts on the Holocaust in the Spanish Synagogue of Venice.” Philosophy and Geography 5. 2 (2002): 195-211.
Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg. “The Altar of Corpus Domini in Urbino: Paolo Uccello, Joos Van Ghent, Piero della Francesca.” Art Bulletin 49 (1967): 1-24.
Mendes-Flohr, Paul R. and Jehuda Renharz (eds.). The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History. Oxford University Press, 1980. pp. 103-124 and 145-177.
Mueller, Reinhold. “The Jewish Moneylenders of Late Trecento Venice: A Revisitation.” Mediterranean Historical Review 10 (1995): 202-217.
Ravid, Benjamin and Robert C. Davis. The Jews of Early Modern Venice. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Sullam, Simon Levis. "‘Their True Tongue’: History, Memory, Language and the Jews of Italy."
In Acculturation and its Discontents: the Jews of Italy from Early Modern to Modern Times. David N. Myers and Peter Ryall eds. Toronto: Toronto University Press,
forthcoming.
Voghera, Gadi Luzzatto. “Italian Jews.” In The Emancipation of Catholics, Jews and Protestants: Minorities and the Nation State in Nineteenth-Century Europe. R. Liedtkee and S.Wendehorst (ed.). Manchester University Press 1999. pp. 169-187.
